The Mad Men GQ+A: Ben Feldman on the Total WTF Moment of the Season

There’s often a sense of unease surrounding the characters of Mad Men, as if they’re in a nightmare and should probably wake up before something terrible happens. Actual moments of violence are rare, but they tend to happen in the most banal circumstances: a foot getting mulched during an office party, a man hanging himself while working overtime, a woman accidentally stabbing her boyfriend in their own apartment. On Sunday night’s episode The Runaways, a small cardboard box was opened to reveal something truly horrifying: a severed body part. The man who mutilated himself in the name of love was Michael Ginsberg, the bizarrely dressed copyrighter who has has always walked a fine line between off-putting and endearing. He had always been a little off-kilter—did he really believe, for example, that he might be a Martian?—but the office’s new computer triggered a descent into total madness, ending with a one-nippled Ginsberg being carted off to the mental hospital. Following that dramatic exit, actor Ben Feldman has seized a new opportunity: He’s starring in the NBC romantic comedy A to Z, which was officially picked up a few days ago. Feldman is busy promoting the fall series at the NBC upfronts, but we managed to get him on the phone for a few minutes to talk about Michael Ginsberg’s memorable breakdown.

GQ: I want to ask you about your new show, but we don’t have much time, so I should probably just ask about that time you cut off your nipple.

Ben Feldman: [Laughs] Always a fun way to start a conversation! What’s funny about that, actually, is that when we did the press line this morning at the presentation, it was so easy to tell which people had seen the episode last night. Because some people would go, you know, "Hey Ben, nice to meet you! LoveMad Men. Anyway..." and then they’d move on without mentioning anything, and I’d be like, you don’t love Mad Men, or else you’d be bringing up what happened! And then other people would just stare at me with a horrified look.

Your character is so distinct in the way he looks and acts and sounds; I think you’ll have a lot of people not connecting you from Mad Men to A to Z.

When I first started doing Mad Men, I was always surprised when people came up to me in person and knew me from Mad Men. Because I was under the impression that I was in some sort of thick disguise. And that was even before the mustache! But apparently I do look that neurotic and weird and Jew-y in real life too. So I think they’ll make the connection just fine.

For a lot of last night’s episode, I was honestly thinking that Peggy should maybe give the nice Jewish boy a chance. Sure, he’s weird and damaged, but he’s also smart and seems sincere...

...And then at some point there’s what my chiropractor refers to as "the dashboard red lights." Whenever I get a little tiny pain in my back, I usually ignore it, and he says, "You need to not ignore those, you need to do something about them. It’s like when the little light goes off on the dashboard of your car. That means something terrible is going to happen eventually." And I feel like everybody had different moments in last night’s episode for when their dashboard light went off for Ginsberg.

When did you find out about that particular twist in the story?

A few weeks before we shot that episode, I sat down with Matt [Weiner]. He called me into his office, and it was actually really cool, because you don’t always get to go into detail with Matt ahead of time about things that are going to happen, unless you’re like, Jared Harris and you’re about to hang yourself. But we did, and it was really cool. I hadn’t read the script yet, and he explained everything that was going to happen, and how it was going to look and how it was going to feel. And I think he was really excited to tell me, and just hoping that I would be excited and not disgusted. And then I think he was excited that I was excited, too. I was really stoked about that.

In retrospect, this episode changes a lot of things that I thought about Michael Ginsberg. Did you feel the same way? Or did you see the pieces falling into the place before that?

You know, you never forsee a nipple getting cut off. So self-mutilation isn’t necessarily where my brain went immediately. But, that said—yeah, I’ve been living inside this dude for a couple years now, and he’s referenced transmissions in his head in the past, and he’s referenced the Holocaust, and I think Mad Men’s the last show to just allow there to be the goofy zany character in the background. Mad Men’s not going to let a character just be that; that’s the stuff of poorly written sitcoms. So it made perfect sense to me that there was something much darker and serious going on.

How as an actor did you connect the dots of his thought process? It gets very extreme very quickly.

Yeah, in a weird way—and I hate to be so dramatic—but in this sort of Shakespearian kind of way, it is there in the writing. As ridiculous and crazy as it sounds, if you approach it as, to him, his nipple is a valve, and he really does have energy inside him that he does need to release—if that’s your starting point, then everything else kind of falls into place. Obviously, you have to leave your usual world of what’s recognized as sanity and normalcy. But yeah, he had pressure and he needed to release it. Some people smoke weed, some people cut their nipples off. There’s your headline!

Do you think SC&P broke him, or was he headed down this path anyway?

I think it was a perfect symphony. Ginsberg was an artist first and foremost, and now in his place he saw a machine and numbers and mechanisms; it wasn’t about creativity anymore.

It seems like his breakdown is a metaphor for what’s going on around him.

Yeah, and he was a big part of Martin Luther King last season, too. They touched on this a lot in this episode, about how America’s falling apart and whether you’re a crazy hippie liberal or an uptight conservative, in some way, everything was sort of different and wrong. And I think that’s what’s happening for him in his life. Tragedy found its way into or adjacent to Ginsberg’s life quite a bit.

There are several times when Ginsberg got paranoid and asked other men if they were "homos." Is the possibility that Ginsberg is gay something that you ever gave much thought to?

Yeah, but so much of it is so open to interpretation, especially with this character. I hate to be the actor playing the character putting the ideas into the audience’s mind. But I will say that it not been lost on me, the idea of that. [Laughs] We’ve become really good at vague answers.

It’s a job requirement!

What’s funny is, this whole season, press people keep asking me, "It’s your last season! What souvenirs are you taking from set?" And I’ve wanted to answer that question for months now, but I swear to God, I have the nipple in my house. I don’t know if I’m supposed to, but I do have it!

No! [Laughs] No, unfortunately, I left all those. I’ve never taken any clothes from the set. If I did I’d be using them as like, blankets and comforters.

Did any of the other cast members have anything to say about Ginsberg’s exit?

Oh yeah, everyone had a lot to say about that episode. That particular night, there just happened to be a lot of actors around anyway. People who had wrapped earlier in the day, you know, they hang out and play Catchphrase all night. So with all the background actors who were there, and Lizzie [Moss] and Jay [Ferguson] and everybody—it ended up being kind of like a party that night. It was more fun than tragic.

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